Chapter 107
MY HEART BEGAN to slam in my chest.
Cobb and two of his cold-blooded killers, whom I now recognized as Hernandez and Kelleher, were not twenty feet from me, eating at the restaurant closest to the garage. Wearing urban camouflage. Hiding in the wide, wide open.
I looked away. For a moment I was unsure what to do. Robby Eden’s was crowded and they had to be armed. Any shooting in here could easily kill an innocent bystander, like the young mom and two kids sitting in the booth right behind the killers.
I’d have to wait until they left, call Townsend to warn—
The decision was made for me.
Cobb began to slide from the booth. Hernandez beat him to it, getting to his feet, blocking my view of Cobb for a second and then stepping left to allow Kelleher to exit.
When he did, I could see Cobb clearly. He was staring in the mirror, locked on my reflection, and then broke his attention away fast and in alarm. He’d recognized me somehow.
It all went instinctual at that point, no choice of action but one.
I went for the Glock in my shoulder holster, got it in one motion, spinning on the counter stool toward the No Prisoners conspirators, meaning to shout and threaten the killers onto the floor, fingers laced behind their heads.
But Hernandez and Kelleher must have seen the warning in Cobb’s eyes. They ducked and twisted toward me, hands clawing for weapons.
My first shot caught Kelleher in the side of the neck, blew him back onto the table. My second shot glanced off Hernandez’s rising gun, severed the tritium bead, and entered his skull through the right eye socket.
Ignoring their bodies falling, ignoring the jerky movements of chaos rising all around me, the screams of panic and the muzzle blast ringing in my ears, I felt as if my gun sought Cobb of its own accord, as if I were nothing but a part of the weapon and not its controller at all.
Cobb stood facing me next to the last booth in the restaurant before a hallway. A terrified young family cowered in the booth beside him. He grinned at me. A thin metal ring and post hung from his teeth.
He held grenades.
Two of them.
“Drop the gun, Mr. Morgan,” he said, around the pin that locked the flip trigger on the explosive. “Or many, many people will die.”